What to Read While Waiting for The Winds of Winter

A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, was published in 2011. The Winds of Winter has not yet arrived. While you wait — and you may be waiting a while — here’s what to read.

Martin’s Own Work in the Meantime

Before looking elsewhere, George R.R. Martin has published substantial Westeros content since Dance:

Fire and Blood (2018) — the history of the Targaryen dynasty from Aegon the Conqueror to the Dance of Dragons. This is the source material for the HBO series House of the Dragon. Not a novel — a history text written in the style of a medieval chronicle — but richly detailed.

The World of Ice and Fire (2014, with Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson) — a beautifully illustrated encyclopedia of Westeros. World-building companion rather than narrative.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2015) — three novellas (the Dunk and Egg tales) collected in one volume, set 100 years before ASOIAF. Lighter in tone than the main series; a young hedge knight and his squire navigate Westeros before the dragons were gone. A fourth Dunk and Egg novella is reportedly complete.

The Dunk and Egg tales are lovely — warmly recommended as Westeros reading that actually got finished.

Grimdark Fantasy: The Most Direct Replacement

The First Law — Joe Abercrombie

The most frequently recommended ASOIAF successor. Abercrombie writes grimdark fantasy with the same moral seriousness, the same willingness to kill characters, and the same refusal of heroic narrative. The First Law world spans nine books across two trilogies and three standalones — substantial enough to fill the wait.

Start with: The Blade Itself (First Law Book 1)

The Poppy War — R.F. Kuang

Military fantasy based on 20th-century Chinese history; a scholarship student discovers terrible power and the price it extracts. The moral devastation of the later books rivals ASOIAF’s worst chapters.

Start with: The Poppy War (Book 1 of 3)

Epic Fantasy With the Same World-Building Scope

The Stormlight Archive — Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is the opposite of GRRM in method — where Martin leaves things unfinished, Sanderson publishes relentlessly — but shares the commitment to an elaborately realised secondary world. Five books of the projected ten are complete.

Start with: The Way of Kings (Stormlight Book 1)

Malazan Book of the Fallen — Steven Erikson

Ten massive novels; the most ambitious fantasy series currently complete. More rewarding than ASOIAF in some respects, more demanding in others. Gardens of the Moon (Book 1) is deliberately disorienting — persist.

Political Intrigue Without the Fantasy

Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel

The Thomas Cromwell trilogy is the political intrigue novel par excellence — court politics, shifting alliances, characters who are never simply good or evil. If what you love about ASOIAF is the chess-game quality of its court scenes, Mantel’s Tudor England is the literary fiction equivalent.

Start with: Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell Book 1)

The Honest Answer

Nothing is quite like ASOIAF while it remains unfinished. The specific pleasure of reading Martin is the tension between his world’s complexity and the knowledge that even he doesn’t know how it ends cleanly.

For the most sustained similar experience: read The First Law trilogy (Abercrombie) and then the Dunk and Egg novellas (Martin). One gives you the grimdark political fantasy; the other gives you more Westeros. Together they’ll last until Martin delivers The Winds of Winter — or until you’ve stopped holding your breath.